miniZibaldone

Maria Immaculata by Carlo Maratta Towards the end of the novel [ The Diary of the Country Priest by Georges Bernanos] (and of the priest ’ s life), the connection is made with childhood, with youthfulness. The country priest had been obsessed with his apparent failure to bring about spiritual results in his ministry. The meeting with the countess had been the first time, a meeting centered on a discussion for which he had not prepared intellectually. He had entered into it with all the innocence of his youth. Thinking back on this, he writes:  “ And I know now that youth is a gift from God, and like all his gifts, carries no regret....There was no old man in me....This awareness is sweet. For the first time in years—perhaps for the first time ever—I seem to stand before my youth and look upon it without mistrust....And my youth looks back at me, forgives me. Disheartened by the sheer clumsiness in me which always kept me back, I demanded of my youth what youth alone can't give, an...

From the Angelus Mary shows us that if we want our life to be happy, God must be placed first, because He alone is great. How many times, instead, we live pursuing things of little importance: prejudices, rancor, rivalry, envy, illusions, superfluous material goods … How much pettiness in life! We know this is the case. Maria today invites us to look up to the “great things” that the Lord has done in her. In us too, in each of us, the Lord does many great things. We must recognize and rejoice, proclaiming God, for these great things. . . . The feast of the Assumption of Mary is a call for all of us, especially for those who are afflicted by doubts and sadness, and live with their eyes looking down and cannot look up. Let’s look up, the sky is open; it does not arouse fear, it is no longer distant, because on the threshold of Heaven there is a mother who awaits us and is our mother. She loves us, smiles and helps us with care. As every mother wants the best for her children, s...

Mary: Faith and Faithfulness Notes from Fr. Luigi Giussani’s words at the XV Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Snows in Andro, Italy, on May 7, 1989 I would like to thank Our Lady and also Fr. Gino for giving me the opportunity to participate, at least in part, in this great, beautiful gesture that a pilgrimage is. It is a great and beautiful gesture because it is a symbol of life: without our willing it, without our thinking of it, one step after the other, life, too, is a walk toward the destiny that is God, He who made us, He who gave us our father and mother, and He who awaits us at the end of our labors–yes, because life is toil. If God came among us (you’ve already meditated on this along the course of your pilgrimage), if God came among us to die, to work like everybody else, but above all to die, it means that life is something toilsome. And, in fact, it is the test for going where there awaits us, as Jacopone da Todi says, the “heavenly reign, that fulfil...

From the homily Mary is a cure for solitude and dispersion. She is the Mother of consolation: she stands “with” those who are “alone”. She knows that words are not enough to console; presence is needed, and she is present as a mother. Let us allow her to embrace our lives. “All who heard were amazed at what the shepherds told them” (Lk 2:18). To be amazed: this is what is asked of us today, at the conclusion of the Octave of Christmas, as we continue to contemplate the Child born for us, lacking everything yet abounding in love. Amazement is what we should feel at the beginning of each year, for life is a gift that constantly gives us a chance to make a new start. Today is also a day to be amazed by the Mother of God. [link]

From the Solemnity of Mary, Theotokos homily Devotion to Mary is not spiritual etiquette; it is a requirement of the Christian life.  If our faith is not to be reduced merely to an idea or a doctrine, all of us need a mother’s heart . Let us now be guided by today’s Gospel.  Only one thing is said about the Mother of God: “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Lk 2:19).  She kept them.  She simply kept; Mary does not speak.  The Gospel does not report a single word of hers in the entire account of Christmas.  Here too, the Mother is one with her Son: Jesus is an “infant”, a child “unable to speak”.  The Word of God, who “long ago spoke in many and various ways” (Heb 1:1), now, in the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4), is silent.  The God before whom all fall silent is himself a speechless child.  His Majesty is without words; his mystery of love is revealed in lowliness. This silence and lowliness is the language of...

Humility is like an emptiness that gives place to God....First of all and above all other graces, which we also have at heart: the grace that is Jesus Christ! And when Mary arrives, joy overflows and bursts from hearts, because Jesus’ invisible but real presence fills everything with meaning: life, the family, the salvation of the people . . . everything!... The great things that God has wrought with humble persons, the great things the Lord does in the world with the humble, because humility is like an emptiness that gives place to God. The humble is powerful because he is humble, not because he is strong. And this is the grandeur of the humble and of humility. I would like to ask you – and also myself – but don’t answer in a loud voice: each one answer in his heart: “how is my humility doing?”...  Always ask for first of all and above all other graces, which we also have at heart: the grace that is Jesus Christ!   [link]

Maria has suffered so much in her life. It makes us think of these women, who are suffering so much. We ask that the Lord to take them to Himself and liberate them from such bondage. From the angelus The Lord looks down on the humble to raise them and we heard this in Mary's song of the Magnificat. And that song reminds us, in particular, of the women overwhelmed by the weight of life and the drama of violence, the women who are slaves of the arrogance of the powerful, the little girls forced into inhuman work, the women forced to surrender themselves in body and spirit to the greed of some men. May the beginning of a life of peace, of justice, of love, come as soon as possible for them, waiting for the day when they may finally feel gripped by hands that do not humble them, but with tenderness raise and lead them along the path of life, to heaven.  The Assumption of Mary is a great mystery that concerns all of us, our future. Mary, in fact, precedes us on the path of those...

The kingdom of God, now as then, “does not come in a way that attracts attention” ( Lk 17:20 ), but rather in littleness, in humility. May each one of us be able to make an interior passage, a Passover of the heart, towards the divine “style” incarnated by Mary . From the homily Instead, in a small village, a simple miracle takes place and brings joy to the wedding of a young and completely anonymous family. At the same time, the water that became wine at the wedding banquet is a great sign, for it reveals to us the spousal face of God, a God who sits at table with us, who dreams and holds communion with us. It tells us that the Lord does not keep his distance, but is near and real . He is in our midst and he takes care of us, without making decisions in our place and without troubling himself with issues of power. He prefers to let himself be contained in little things, unlike ourselves, who always want to possess something greater. To be attracted by power, by grandeur, by ap...

To serve the Lord means to listen and to put His Word into practice. It is the simple, but essential recommendation of Jesus’ Mother and it is the Christian’s program of life. To draw from the jar is equivalent for each one of us to entrust ourselves to the Word of God to experience its efficacy in life. From the audience What is at the foundation of our faith? — An act of mercy with which Jesus has united us to Himself. And the Christian life is the answer to this love. It is like the story of two who are in love. God and man meet one another, seek one another, find one another, celebrate and love one another: precisely like the loved and beloved in the Canticle of Canticles. All the rest comes as consequence of this relationship. The Church is Jesus’ family in which His love is poured out; it is this love that the Church cherishes and wishes to give to all....  Mary’s words to the servants crown the nuptial picture: “Do whatever He tells you” (v. 5). It’s interesting: they...

The epicentre of his [a Christian's] heart is outside of himself. He is not drawn by his own “I”, but by the “Thou” of God and by the “we” of other men and women. From the homily Contemplating the Heart of Christ, we are faced with the fundamental question of our priestly life: Where is my heart directed? Our ministry is often full of plans,  projects and activities: from catechesis to liturgy, to works of charity, to pastoral and administrative commitments. Amid all these, we must still ask ourselves:  What is my heart set on, where is it directed, what is the treasure that it seeks? For as Jesus says: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt  6:21). ...  To help our hearts burn with the charity of Jesus the Good Shepherd, we can train ourselves to do three things suggested to us by today’s readings: seek out,  include and rejoice....  Such is a heart that seeks out – a heart that does not set aside times and spaces as private, a ...

So let us go forward! Do not forget about prayer. Pray as best you can, and if you fall sleep in front of the tabernacle, so be it. But pray! Don’t ever lose this. Don’t fail to let yourselves be gazed upon by Our Lady, and keep her always as your Mother. Don’t ever lose your zeal, and your closeness and availability to people. And also, may I say: Don’t ever lose your sense of humour… So let’s move forward! From the priest's retreat Our people value this in a priest who cares for the poor and the sick, for those whose sins he forgives and for those whom he patiently teaches and corrects… Our people forgive us priests many failings, except for that of attachment to money. This they don’t forgive. It is not so much about money itself, but the fact that money makes us lose the treasure of mercy. Our people can sniff out which sins are truly grave for a priest, the sins that kill his ministry because they turn him into a bureaucrat or, even worse, a mercenary. I have always be...

The heart that God joins to this moral misery of ours is the heart of Christ, his beloved Son, which beats as one with that of the Father and the Spirit. It is a  heart that chooses the fastest route and takes it. Mercy gets its hands dirty. It touches, it gets involved, it gets caught up with others, it gets personal. It does  not approach “cases” but persons and their pain. Mercy exceeds justice; it brings knowledge and compassion; it leads to involvement.  From the priest's retreat Let us think for a moment about the “embarrassed dignity” of this prodigal yet beloved son. If we can serenely keep our heart balanced between those two extremes – dignity and embarrassment – without letting go of either of them, perhaps we can feel how the heart of our Father beats with love for us.... Let us look a little more closely at this, and ask why this tension is so fruitful. The reason, I would say, is that it is the result of a free decision. The Lord  acts mainly throu...

If God favors humility, it is not to humiliate us: rather humility is the necessary condition to be raised by Him, so as to experience the mercy that comes to fill our emptiness. If the prayer of the arrogant does not reach God’s heart, the humility of the miserable one opens it wide. God has a weakness: a weakness for the humble. Before a humble heart, God opens His heart totally. From the audience [T]he parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (cf. Luke 18:9-14). ...  Both the protagonists go to the Temple to pray, but they act in very different ways, obtaining opposite results. The Pharisee “stood” (v. 11) to pray, and used many words. His prayer was one of thanksgiving addressed to God, but in reality it was a display of his merits, with a sense of superiority vis-a-vis “other men,” described as “extortioners, unjust, adulterers,” as, for example — and he points to the other who was there – “this tax collector” (v. 11). But the problem is precisely here: the Pharisee prays...

Through Mary’s service towards others, through that encounter, our Lord’s promise is renewed and makes it happen now, just as it did then. From the homily “Christians with a grimace or disgruntled expression on their faces, sad Christians, are a very ugly thing.  It’s really ugly, ugly, ugly. However, they are not  fully Christian. They think they are (Christians) but they are not fully so. This is the Christian message. And in this atmosphere of joy that today’s liturgy gives  us like a gift, I would like to underline just two things: first, an attitude; second, a fact. The attitude is one of service or helping others.” ...  “The courage of women. The courageous women who are present in the Church: they are like Mary. These women who bring up their families, these women who are  responsible for rearing their children, who have to face so many hardships, so much pain, women who look after the sick….   Courageous: they get up and help other  people...

The Easter Triduum is the memorial of a drama of love that gives us the certainty that we will never be abandoned in life’s trials. From the general audience Our reflection on God’s mercy introduces us today to the Easter Triduum . We will live Holy Thursday, Friday and Saturday as intense moments, which enable us to enter increasingly in the great mystery of our faith: the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Everything in these three days speaks of mercy, because it renders visible the point that God’s love can reach. [...]  On Holy Thursday Jesus institutes the Eucharist , anticipating in the paschal banquet His sacrifice on Golgotha. [...]  Holy Friday is the culminating moment of love. ...A love that intends to embrace all , no one excluded. [...]  And, finally, Holy Saturday is the day of God’s silence. It must be a day of silence . We must do everything possible so that it is a day of silence, as that Day, which was the day of God’s silence. Jesus pla...

Jesus, Peter, and the Keys by Scott Butler  The Kiss from the Cross by Ronda Chervin Life Everlasting by Reginald Garrigou LaGrange  Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen  The Bible in Modern Culture by Walter Sundberg  The Immaculate Conception by William Ullathorne  The Devil by Gerald Vann  The Five Wounds of the Church by Antonio Rosmini  Design for a Just Society by James Alberione The Last Things by James Alberione Christ's Appeal for Love by Josefa Menendez

Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist by Brant Pitre Christians in the Face of Injustice by Ricardo Antoncich  The Book of Miracles by Zsolt Aradi  A Doctor at Calvary by Pierre Barbet  The Church Speaks to the Modern World by Leo XIII Mother and Disciple by Charles Miller   All About Angels by Paul O'Sullivan   How To be Happy How To Be Holy by Paul O'Sullivan   Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J. I. Packer  The Real Presence by Michael Parker  Mary Mother of Christ and Christians by Joseph-Marie Perrin Your God is Too Small by J. B. Phillips 

The Survival of Dogma by Avery Dulles Prayer by Karl Barth The Jews, Views, and Counterviews by Jean Danielou and Andre Chouraqui What the Heavens Declare by Lydia Jaeger   An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin by N. M. Wildiers The New World of Faith by Avery Dulles    Models of the Church by Avery Dulles What Is God Like? by James Schall   Mary the Mother of Jesus by Franz William How to Think About God by Mortimer Adler   Mystery of Creation by Paul Haffner